Can the Tide Keep Rolling?

Alabama head coach Nick Saban's team, the defending national champion, is building the only dynasty in college football. WSJ's Matthew Futterman discusses how Alabama's football culture and a relentless recruiting strategy put this team on top. Photo: Getty Images.

By

Matthew Futterman

Updated Jan. 6, 2013 1:41 p.m. ET

College football isn't supposed to lend itself to dynasties any more. Like the pros, with its salary caps, and player drafts throwing the best young prospects to the worst teams, college football discourages one-team domination.

The players move on after four years or less. Top teams win, then often go on probation for how they got there. Administrators gnash their teeth about academic standards. A chorus of critics calls for reforming a system seen as exploiting student-athletes, casting off many with battered bodies, little education and no future career.

ENLARGE

Alabama is looking to win its third national title in four years, an unprecedented accomplishment in the current era of college football.
photo illustration by William Duke

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The 2012 college football season culminates in the BCS National Championship Game on Jan. 7. WSJ's Darren Everson and Rachel Bachman preview the match-up between defending champion Alabama and number-one-ranked Notre Dame. (Photo: Getty Images)

Players and coaches from both Notre Dame and Alabama eagerly await what promises to be an epic BCS championship game on Monday. Photo: Associated Press.

So how to explain the Alabama Crimson Tide? Head coach Nick Saban's team, the defending national champion, appears to inhabit a parallel universe. The team is favored to roll over the Notre Dame Fighting Irish in Monday night's championship game. That would give Alabama its third national title in four years, an unprecedented accomplishment in the current era of college football.

On the surface it's an odds-defying prospect, but Saban's arrival in 2007 after two years in the NFL sparked a perfect marriage between coach and team. Saban functions not as a backslapping golf buddy of university boosters, but as a CEO. And his school provides him the perfect conditions for winning.

"It's a machine," said Shannon Terry, an Alabama native who founded the college-sports websites Rivals.com and the 247sports.com. "These things can be cyclical, but it's Alabama's time right now and who knows how long it can last."

Today, nearly every other major power in college football operates under a microscope. Ohio State and USC have each spent time on probation in recent years. Penn State is reeling from the sexual abuse scandal. Other universities struggle to compete with professional teams that share their markets.

Then there's Alabama, a football paradise. The Crimson Tide are the pre-eminent institution in a state with no major professional sports team and just a single Fortune 500 company. They play in a conference that has evolved into the closest thing to an NFL division in college. In Alabama, there is little grumbling about Saban's highest-in-the-nation pay package—a contract that will pay him some $5.6 million this year and some $45 million through 2019.

Saban, who declined to be interviewed for this story, landed in Miami with his team Wednesday with his usual businesslike approach.

ENLARGE

Alabama running back Eddie Lacy broke a tackle on his way to scoring a second-quarter touchdown during the SEC Championship in December.
Getty Images

Keys to Victory

"Michael Jordan always said it doesn't matter how many game-winning shots I've made in the past, all that matters is the next one," Saban told reporters at the airport. "And that's really what matters to our guys."

Nearly all football coaches are tireless workers and control freaks, but Saban ups the ante. He has been known to keep a motivational expert on the sidelines to help him with his pregame and halftime speeches. He drives assistant communications directors as hard as his assistant coaches. In an era when more head coaches are switching to pass-dominated offenses that mimic NFL teams and make the quarterback the game manager, Alabama is still built around a conservative running game that grinds out yards.

His power also derives from the backing of the most important people in the state and the university, many of whom have a personal connection to the team. The president pro tempore of the Board of Trustees of the University of Alabama System is Paul W. Bryant Jr., son of the legendary former coach Paul "Bear" Bryant. Gov. Robert Bentley has two degrees from the school and is a rabid fan. A dermatologist who for years treated the team's coaches, Bentley said the football team helps make Alabama a "nationwide school" where students can also get a good education.

"So many positive things in this state are because of Alabama football," Bentley said.

Judy Bonner took over as president of the university in November after serving as provost, the school's chief academic officer, since 2003.

She noted that the recent gridiron success has coincided with more than 26,400 high-school students applying for a seat in the 2012-13 freshman class, up 19% over 2011. "And the quality of our students, based on ACT scores and high-school GPAs, has never been higher."

The 2012 college football season culminates in the BCS National Championship Game on Jan. 7. WSJ's Darren Everson and Rachel Bachman preview the match-up between defending champion Alabama and number-one-ranked Notre Dame. (Photo: Getty Images)

Saban's compensation is justified, Bonner said, because the university athletic department pays for itself. According to studies, each Crimson Tide home game pumps $24.3 million into the state's economy. For the 2011 season, the university reported $82 million in total football revenue, with a $45.1 million profit. In 2006, a year before Saban's arrival in Tuscaloosa, the program generated $53.2 million, with $31.9 million in profit. (The University of Texas has the country's richest operation with more than $100 million in annual revenues.) Alabama has invested some $200 million in its sports facilities.

Last year Alabama athletics, which essentially means the football program, turned over more than $5 million to the rest of the university, including $1 million for faculty support, $3.2 million for academic scholarships, and $825,000 in other academic support.

The school's athletics infrastructure is unrecognizable from what it looked like in the 1990s, said Ben Sutton, chief executive of sports conglomerate IMG's college division, which represents Alabama sports. "They were 20, 25 years behind their peer set," he said. "They were living on fumes and selling on the smoke and mirrors of what had been there." The stadium had rundown locker rooms, aging training rooms and free-weight equipment dating from the 1970s.

Saban's first trip to the national championship game with Alabama in 2009 generated an extra $2 million in royalties from the sales of licensed merchandise, Sutton said.

There is no more likely place for this sort of dynasty to spring from than the Southeastern Conference, which has remained rock-solid and dominating, while other conferences morph into confusion pursuing TV money.

The SEC collects more than $200 million a year in television rights fees, and is now in talks to launch a national sports cable network featuring its games in the style of the successful Big Ten Network. The Crimson Tide would give the network a national following: Only Texas sold more licensed merchandise than Alabama last year.

But Alabama separates itself from the rest of the football-crazed SEC because it doesn't have to compete with a major professional sports team, has a head coach with the NFL chops that the best high school players are looking for now, and is steeped in a rich tradition of winning that makes future championships seem inevitable—even in a relatively small and poor state.

It's all about the players, of course, but college football coaches deal their own hand. Tom Lemming, an analyst with the CBS Sports Network and widely recognized as the country's leading expert on college football recruiting, said in his 34 years of covering the process he has never seen a more relentless or effective recruiter as Saban.

"The great ones, recruiting is their hobby," Lemming said. "We all know college football coaches love to play golf, but you show me a good golfer and I'll show you a bad recruiter."

Unlike Texas or Florida or USC, which can home-grow much of their rosters, Alabama must go out of state for as many as 70% of its recruits (Texas takes 10% from elsewhere). Last fall Lemming was watching game film with Leonard Fournette, a junior running back at St. Augustine High School in New Orleans who will likely be the country's top recruit in 2014. In other words, Fournette wouldn't appear in an Alabama uniform for another two years. Yet in the middle of the film Fournette's coach reminded him he had a 4 p.m. phone call scheduled with Saban.

Cooper Bateman of Salt Lake City, considered a top high school quarterback this year, committed to Alabama last May.

So far this year Saban has 21 commitments from high school seniors. Six are from Alabama, and two have received five stars, the highest ranking, from the country's leading evaluators. (Each year there are about two dozen five-star players in the country).

Saban doesn't just pick teen phenoms. Few colleges took notice of offensive guard Chance Warmack in 2008, when he was a senior at Westlake High School in Atlanta. Warmack was a three-star player struggling to drum up major-college interest. Yet he has started every game the past three years for Alabama and is now considered a likely NFL first-round pick. Time and again, Saban has gone into the country's leading football hotbeds to pluck their best players.

Last January, Anthony Averett, a three-star defensive back from Woodbury, N.J., was beginning to field offers from Rutgers, the University of Pittsburgh and a few other schools in the football-challenged Northeast. Then Alabama reached out to him. No one was more surprised than Averett, who has always wanted to play in the Southeastern Conference because it is the main talent pipeline for the NFL. Averett committed to Alabama and Saban on April 14.

"He really focuses on developing the defensive backs and developing them for the NFL," Averett said of Saban.

Indeed, Saban's status as the top supplier of NFL talent is a major attraction. He isn't shy about touting his experience working as a defensive coordinator for New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, when Belichick was coaching the Cleveland Browns, or his two years coaching the Miami Dolphins.

Though his Dolphins never made the playoffs, players know his stamp of approval carries weight with NFL evaluators,. Playing well and working hard for him is currently the surest route to making a living at football. NFL teams selected four players from Alabama in the first round of the 2012 draft, more than from any other school. They chose another in the second round, and eight overall, also the most in the country. In 2011, Alabama also had four first-round picks, including two of the top six.

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